Retreat is over, back to the Real World

It's Sunday morning and I need to ease myself back into the Real World today after 3 days of quilting and relaxing. Yesterday Victoria, one of my quilting friends, came to my house and we had fun. After we shared some of our current projects we settled down with a cup of tea, assorted tea sandwiches and chocolate cake and got some quilting done. She cut nickels for a project and I took the fabric from a quilt I was making for mom and turned it into a whole different quilt. By last night I had all 99 blocks cut, sewn and pressed and ready for trimming. Today I am overseeing my FDIL as she puts the final borders on her first quilt. Later this afternoon I have to go to the office for a couple hours before I pick up Bruce at the airport at dinner time.

About 3:15 yesterday Victoria and I were talking about shopping and I mentioned that Marden's Surplus store is not far from my house. Marden's has a great selection of quality quilt fabric. Nearly all of it is less than $3 a yard. So, before you could count to 10, we packed up our projects, put on our shoes, grabbed our wallets and went shopping! Here's what I bought:

This quilt is one I put together last summer. It was a mystery by Dorothy Young, called Contrary Quarters. My quilt came out a little different than the original pattern. I will be giving it to my SIL and her family. Her DH is a Marine and is currently stationed at the American Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. I had white borders on it, but didn't like them. So I was glad when I found this fabric yesterday.


I decided not to waste time waiting for inner border and backing for mom's quilt. The gold is for the inner border. The cat fabric, which is the focus fabric of the quilt, I bought a year ago. The burgundy is the background. One of cool parts of buying fabric at Marden's is that if you buy what's on the bolt you get an additional 10% off the price. So the burgundy is about 5 yeards of fabric.



Recently on one of my quilt groups a quilter wrote that she occasionally buys a bolt of focus fabric and will make several quilts from it. That concept appealed to me so I looked for a couple of focus fabrics just to have on hand. I found two that I like. The top fabric was only $1 a yard. The bottom one was $2.99 a yard.





Since I have used most of my blenders I purchased a couple yards of blenders to put back in my stash.



My last fabric purchase was a yard of pre-made labels. I got 36 labels from this yard so now I have no excuses not to put a label on my quilts.



I also bought two yards of paper backed fusbile web to try my hand at applique. This month's issue of Fons & Porter magazine has a cute teapot and tea cup wallhanging. But I thought I would make about 3 or 4 of the teapots and put them on my Tea Time Splash quilt before I put on the borders.

Well, it's time to get dressed and get my day going. Thanks for stopping by!